Building a social networking site from scratch or using a social networking script?

i'm ready now to start the project.

So which of the 3 scripts will you suggest i start with.
I want to be able to modify it to uniqueness and tailored to my community needs.
I want something i can run myself until it grows to a level i can involve more hands. for now i would probably want to have say maybe 2 people working for me on the site.

I would have love to build from scratch but because i dont have the required knowledge to handle it from there, thats why i want to go with a ready made script and get someone or people to modify it for me.

Just thinking, what about going with a clone script and modifying as well?

please, any good developer, programmer or coder is welcome to contact as i want some hands on this job and i have idea i want to be implemented on this project from the onset.

I await your quick replies.

Thanks

 

I am doing a significant social networking project myself and there are a few things I have learned:

Social Engine does not work well at large scale
Modifying a an out-of-the-box script means you can no longer upgrade it
Many times you will hire a team to build on to your network things that are coming in the next official upgrade
Modifying a script many times causes issues to generate in the script, sometimes it takes months to find and eliminate them
Don't install 3rd party mods, they can cause errors which may not be detected until much later

I would try http://phpfox.com/ v3 when it comes out. I got the beta and it looks great. I plan to test it at large scale before making any moves. Sometimes a script works great until you have several thousand members and then you find out it's really inefficient.

I used Social Engine for one of my main sites and I regret it. We have 24,000 members now and I am not sure how to continue. It has become inefficient at this size. I need to switch to something else as I pay more than 1K for hosting per month.

 

@Jouvan, thanks a lot but i'm not trying to take on facebook. facebook is general, mine will be niche.

@Aaron, thanks for the info. l really like socialengine but just like you have said and like some others have told me, it doesn't seem to perform well at large scale. it leaves me with phpfox and jomsocial but i'm also not sure how they would perform at large scale too. l also understand that modifications to a certain level will not allow for normal upgrade of the script and might also cause some problems on the script as well. This is why keep thinking of building from scratch because l need uniqueness.

what about starting with a script and later transferring to a custom made site built from scratch without losing data and causing problems for the site and users? will this be possible a l have been thinking of this.

inside of me, feel that building from scratch will best but a problem is getting a good developer who understands the job and would notcharge outrageously.

ideas and infos are vital to me now as i'm about starting this project.

what do you think?

 

"what about starting with a script and later transferring to a custom made site built from scratch without losing data and causing problems for the site and users? will this be possible a l have been thinking of this."

This sounds like a great idea. You will learn what you want by starting on one technology and changing all the things you do not like. PHPfox might do it however. I have yet to try it at scale. Don't use the current V2 version, V3 is much better and its soon to launch. There are many other scripts out there other than SE and PHPfox. Look through them and build a list. Ask your potential members what they like.

We should really work together. I am doing the same thing you are and I am at the point of moving from one script to possibly a custom script.

One major piece of advice, in my experience most communities fail quite quickly after launch. Social Engine is an amazing technology for small scale, however, take a look at their showcase list and you will see that:

1) An amazing amount of time and (possibly money) went into each site's design and custom changes
2) All of them are pretty much failed, no one really visits them


Test the market first to see if you can attract a group of committed followers. If you change scripts the committed ones will change with you if you find them. What I find is most sites fail due to a lack of planning. Do you have a marketing plan? Facebook became great because it had a great marketing plan (email friends on sign up -- a plan that no longer works at all) and it also created some great inventions (newsfeed).

Please do let me know if you make a list of the scripts you find as I would also love a copy.

One last thing I should share is that you need salable technology. If you do not get a script that supports load balancing then you will be stuck the moment you need a server bigger than your hosting companies biggest. I am now facing that challenge (96 GB RAM machine).

 

It's doable, but you're going to limit yourself to the data format of the script you use initially. Completely changing the database schema will probably mean losing all your data.

If you're not going to code it yourself, your biggest problem will be getting enough money to pay the developer. No one who can do a job like this in a reasonable amount of time is going to do it for a few thousand dollars. "Outrageously" begins at 7 figures or more. (A social networking system that can be expanded to thousands of users isn't a forum.)

 

Thanks for the advice though i would still welcome more.

I already have marketing & publicity plan & i believe it would go a long way i helping.

what do you think about the jomsocial script?

any ideas as to where i can find a good developer who can do a decent job and charge moderately as i want to start small & grow with time ?

someone mentioned using a clone script which would be modified to my users needs, what do you think about that ? & which clone script would you suggest ?

hoping to hear from you guys about all of the above.

thanks

 

Hello guys, what do you think about my last post/questions? i would like to hear from you guys? Thanks